I went down into the pit Tuesday to see Bertha’s breakthrough.
I went because the news said, “Breaking news: Bertha breakthrough,” and I realized I have been covering this tunnel and the question of what we’re going to do with the highway on Seattle’s waterfront for as long as I’ve been a newspaper columnist.
Can news be called “breaking” when it takes 15-plus years to get here?
One time my in-laws were visiting from Nashville and I had written a column on the city’s fierce Alaskan Way Viaduct debate. This was maybe 2010. They read it and remarked: “The last time we were visiting, which was five years ago, you also had a column about this Alaskan Way Viaduct.”
As I watched Bertha grind through to daylight, nearly three years late, all of this ground through my mind. This project is on its fourth mayor and third governor. People have attended more than 700 community meetings and voted on it three times since the Nisqually quake shook the old double-decker highway in February 2001. Seattle’s not good at deciding anything, but this truly vexed us. It was the “riddle in Seattle’s middle.”
Making a shift
What’s amazing today is how much has shifted since then — both in how Seattle has grown and how it thinks about itself.
For starters, the main practical argument against this tunnel was that it didn’t go anywhere. “There are no exits to downtown,” I heard a thousand times at a hundred meetings. “Who will use it?”
But a funny thing happened in our years of dithering: Downtown moved. This project is taking so long that the gravitational pull of the entire central city has reoriented to the north — coincidentally bracketing where Bertha came out of the ground.
I walked the new tunnel’s off-ramp into South Lake Union on Tuesday. It dumps into the heart of one of the fastest-growing job markets in the nation. Right now there are 22 skyscrapers of 40 stories planned for development within 10 blocks of the tunnel’s exit. It was mostly antique stores and old auto dealerships in 2001.
It’s as if Bertha were a children’s book character, known for her pointless wandering. But when she popped up Tuesday, miraculously in the middle of the hottest neighborhood on the West Coast, she could say: “I knew I was going somewhere all along!”
Seriously, West Seattleites who derided this tunnel all those years: If you now work at Amazon, as increasingly many of you do, somehow this boondoggle with no exits has morphed into a direct stoplight-free track to your offices. And for you car haters, there’s no reason the tunnel can’t now be used as a major express-bus route to the Amazon jungle.
Dumb luck? Probably. But it’s no road to nowhere anymore.
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